In complex abstract paintings that allude to music, science, maps, the realm of the spirit and more, the artists of Order(ed) describe relationships and structures that capture some truth about life in our busy, often turbulent, and always surprising world.

From a vocabulary of regular and repeating shapes and lines, the artists build visual structures that hint at chaos and point to the age-old need of humans to impose order on the world. The works in the exhibit range from hard-edged, bright and almost industrial in nature to soft, nuanced and obviously hand-made. Throughout, each artist speaks with an individualized vocabulary of shapes, colors, and lines; yet this does not create a Babel-like cacophony. For the unifying spark that flows from one work to another is the idea of the mind ordering these mini-universes into visual relational databases, with hierarchies or perhaps non-hierarchical links, but networked, gridded, mapped and fixed as if in a snapshot from some ongoing greater whole.

I suppose this could be the anti-entropy show: The artist as warrior against the forces of inertia.

The artists’ personal constructs have almost free-associative charm. What you see is a circle, but what you get-unlike what Frank Stella said in his youth**-is not just a circle. The circles, squares and lines in these abstract paintings are not math or science, but painted visual hypotheses about the world.

Art itself has rules for ordering, both design principles and materials’ dictates. Most but not all artists sketch-and some in this exhibit sketch on the computer. Sketching is a way to order thoughts about a design. Painters must adhere to the rules dictated by their paint and supports. Acrylic paint dries fast, oil paint dries slowly; some paint works better on panel; some techniques are great on Plexiglas; encaustic must be heated to be malleable. Success or failure follows the orderly use of materials. Each artist here is attuned to the process.

While the stream of geometric abstraction runs deep in 20th century art, these artists are no more making Malevich-like abstractions than they are making Mondrian-like abstractions, although both of those artists would be acknowledged by many as influences. Today’s geometric abstract art comes out of the cauldron of the times and merges our need for personal expression with our need for a system, a way out of the clutter, chaos and overload that are a part of our world.

Beauty in this exhibit (and there is plenty throughout) is not the showboating variety of sublime sunsets or Op Art dazzle. Order(ed) beauty is the cool grace of a well-made system; the elegance that unfolds with study as relationships and harmonious interplay are discovered. Such beauty is meditative and can be found in aboriginal art as well as in these sophisticated Western paintings.

Music, the organizing of disparate voices and instruments into a composition, lies beneath the surface of many of these works. It’s there in the suggestion of flow and counter-flow, crescendo and diminuendo all made manifest by line, shape, color and visual rhythm. Works by Howard R. Barnhart and Burton Kramer move with music’s rhythms. Tim McFarlane’s works, too, seem to be orchestrating.

The comfort of spiritual order is conjured in works of a slow, contemplative nature by Joanne Mattera, Gail Gregg and Tremain Smith. In each case, the use of sumptuous encaustic materials fosters the connection between comfort and beauty.

Spiritual questing is here in Mark Brown’s and Vincent Romaniello’s works that convey the void and a yin-yang universe. Marjorie Mikasen’s fractured world also reflects a quest, to understand the chaos it seems to describe.

Ancient stone circles, carved runes and cosmic mysteries are suggested in labyrinth- like works by Grace DeGennaro, Cheryl Goldsleger, and Alex Queral. These pieces speak of ordering systems a thousand years old. On the other hand, works by Julie Karabenick, Steven Baris, and W. C. Richardson seem as contemporary as the latest tools to navigate the modern information labyrinth: maps, charts, grids, networks and data displays.

Works by Laurie Fendrich and Julie Gross look like they may have evolved out of thoughts about pop-culture-or thoughts about channeling the zeitgeist. Ebullient and cartoony, the works by these two artists marry an almost child-like sense of wonder with a mindset far more advanced.

Taxonomies employed by the Order(ed) artists to classify, organize and serve up truth about the world are as varied as each individual artist. The truth of this exhibit is that geometrically-based abstract art can provide stories that are relevant today. Here, what you see is what you see-and more.
INDIVIDUALITY

Each of these artists has a unique approach to his or her abstract art. Here, we will consider them individually.

Steven Baris’s works evoke a benign world of zero gravity where families of rectangles float free, yet maintain connection, touching sweetly. Hierarchy, repetition and order are suggested in Random Clusters #36-a bulletin board-like piece populated by jaunty colored squares denoting, perhaps, tasks of varying importance. Baris’s loose, almost lazy-day pattern implies drift and possibly-shifting hierarchies, the whole bound together by the slow flow of energy. Toys “R” Us colors add a layer of unreality and game. Yet the pink translucent soup in which these objects float holds secrets. Beneath its watery luminescence floats a layer of ghosts of ambiguous meaning.

Howard R. Barnhart calls his energetic relief constructions “compositions,” and of all the compositions that come to mind, musical composition is the one most suggested by the lines, notes and jazzy swoops of works like Construction 7. This puzzle-like piece suggests a marriage of Mondrian and Mozart. With its arrow-like dynamism and frolicsome curves, the work is a ballet with muscle and en pointe delicacy. Construction 7′s unexpected, machine-bright colors pit the drama of red and black against the cool modern design colors of Ikea. It’s the duet of art and life.

Winterreise 17, Mark Brown’s stripe painting on birch panels, is a trip into the void. Unlike Barnett Newman’s zip paintings, which imply speed and a mystical state glimpsed through a sluice in a field of color, Winterreise-with its super-sized zip that is a vast black hole-implies stasis and existential questioning. The atmospheric oil and alkyd panels suggest architecture and perhaps the struggle of the weak and vulnerable against the strong and powerful. This is a world in which heroic action is needed to confront the unknown.

By amassing her shapes into repeat patterns of overlapping grids and veils, Grace DeGennaro’s labor-intensive oil paintings create propulsive energy fields. Pattern Memory (Spray), a golden yellow work with a radiating target on top of a dense chorus of smoky circles, conveys the idea of the veil beyond which lies a zone of energy and discovery. The piece’s transparency is the gateway that reveals intersections between and among shapes. As new entities are revealed, new ways of experiencing the world are suggested. “Go deep” is the message.

Laurie Fendrich’s paintings suggest the meander and flow of life lived in an urban zone: Rectangles of color are sidewalks or maps; rounded shapes evoke animals and humans. While the real world is implied, it’s a world half-pixilated, a picture not quite resolved on the computer. His Usual Philosophic Composure is a Colorforms-by-way-of-Pac-man piece. Iconic and comic, the work’s bright industrial colors and well groomed edges suggest that order is achievable. But the puppy-dog-friskiness and sense of play add the p.s.: Chaos lies around the corner.

Cheryl Goldsleger’s linear designs based on nested squares, circles and triangles are like fragments from ancient labyrinths. These shapes are pre-mathematical. They speak of crop circles, Stonehengian rituals and the human need to communicate with the realm of the spirit. Exchange, a wall-spanning 9-panel oil and encaustic, morphs the designs from one panel to the next, creating imbalance, flux, and a cartwheeling rhythm. Goldsleger carves the surface designs into the unpigmented wax, and the resulting surface may remind you of carvings in the real world, perhaps those found on Celtic crosses.

Tension between nature and the man-made is Gail Gregg’s territory. From aerial note taking in travels over the Midwest, Gregg observes the big sweep of the land and she notes in particular the human attempts to order what is innately unorganizable-the earth, rivers, mountains and prairies. La Crosse suggests a utopian slice of life where striped crop plantings come together from perhaps two neighbors whose properties abut. Of course the earth is not flat and neighbors will dispute, but Gregg’s world of visual beauty is incantatory and her wish for peace as old as any mother’s prayer.

Perfect sinuous shapes compete for attention in Julie Gross’s works. The rush of life itself comes at you in her circles with tails, each touching and squeezing and promoting itself as the one. “Choose me!” cry the yellow, purple and green globules in Mercuree, a lava lamp of a piece, its population dense and active as if propelled by some instinctual Darwinian need to be seen, fed, loved. Gross’s painting has perfection on its mind. Its smooth surface and crisp delineation evoke life created in a laboratory by a human hand and mind striving for order, harmony and beauty.

Julie Karabenick’s paintings, with bars of quiet color and tiny squares of what looks like confetti, evoke systems and relationships. Composition 61 suggests that life is a cornucopia of big and small, slow and fast, weak and strong. Some will be anchors while others bungee around freely, taking risks and providing energy. The glue that holds it all together is relationships-one object touches another and helps it maintain its place. Question is, who are the anchors and who the free spirits? Do the large anchor the tiny-or are the tiny the sheep dogs herding the big? In this mutable world, order is achieved variously.

Burton Kramer’s acrylic paintings are a waltz frozen in time, or perhaps musical chairs at the precise moment the music stops. Bourée 2, with its astroturf green color and flag-like directionals, reads like a plan (circuit board perhaps) for a game in which stick-like players circle around a large central space that is a window, door, dance floor or gym. While machine precision and perfection are suggested, Kramer’s composition also has rich human underpinnings about the beauty of stable relationships. In giving even the smallest member of the composition space, time and freedom to shine, Kramer brings harmony and balance to his utopian dance.

Soft and suggestive, Joanne Mattera’s Uttar 135 is a grid so sensual it reads like a box of bonbons. Mattera, whose encaustic works have undeniably cheery colors and delicious handling of materials, is an artist who delights in the process. With a palette influenced by Indian miniature painting and with a love of non-narrative, non-objective expression, Mattera delivers a world of beauty and order in which individuals-with their spontaneous expressions of color, texture, drip, drop and slather-are valued. Uttar 135 is a statement of peace and a meditation on life’s wonders.

Tim McFarlane’s architectural abstractions are imbued with energy and flow and a heightened color palette that suggests a big band. By repeating a single motif of a ladder in various colors and in directions both vertical and horizontal, Folding in on History conveys the overlapping, interweaving, competitive plenitude of urban infrastructure (bridges, roads, buildings) and its human community knit inextricably together. The order suggested is hierarchical. The biggest, loudest (and not necessarily the most beautiful) sit on top. The white layer, like a picket fence, stripes in the American flag, or a teacher or leader, orchestrates the vibrant world beneath.

Like an illustration for a journal article on chaos theory, Marjorie Mikasen’s Proprio displays a fractured microscopic or macroscopic stew. The piece has a maze-like structure (few points of entry, many dead-end avenues and a center that’s hidden). Is it a cubistic portrait of our complex universe? A graphic display of data processed by a Cuisinart? While Proprio suggests the chaotic, the arrhythmic and the dysfunctional, its lines, shapes and colors have somehow achieved harmonious interplay. Indeed the piece seems to celebrate the natural world and its crystalline, multi-faceted beauty.

It might be a honeycomb, a crystal or a tissue section under a microscope, but in all interpretations, Alex Queral’s Linear Accumulation of Light IV conveys the beauty of structure and light. The grisaille acrylic painting eschews the colors of the natural world. Yet the hard-edged work, begun by laying down a line and responding intuitively, evokes the patience of nature building a whole from an accumulation of small events over time. There’s a hint of threat from the spiraling, forward-moving beam of light hurling itself through space, unstoppable in its trajectory. Order can be a lightening bolt or the creation of new life.

Vincent Romaniello’s works set up a tension between the flow of nature and the hard edged circumscription of the man-made. Black Portal 502 includes vaporous areas of paint delicately applied, encased by precise rectangles that imply window, door or other man-made portals (television, computer, etc.). Romaniello casts no value judgment on the opposite poles of his paintings. He loves them both and sees them as the yin-yang of life. In this geometric equation, the ruled area dignifies the flow and the flow kisses the edge, and while the viewer herself may treasure the flow or ruled edge better, life dictates the embrace of both equally.

Channeling both Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and the New York subway map, W. C. Richardson’s Low Buried Wild is musical and urban. But whereas Mondrian’s stutter-step grid is a flatlander, Richardson’s network is deep and fluid, with spiral jetty transit lines that-if you stare long enough-will mesmerize. My MTA map won’t mesmerize and will get me somewhere. Richardson’s nodes, lines and layers are, on the other hand, a more beautiful mode of transport-right into inner space. Richardson achieves optical pop with delicacy. His painting is an elegant subversion.

Working within a self-imposed rectilinear structure, Tremain Smith finds the freedom to experiment. With stroke, color, materials and ideas about the sublime, the painter builds up irregular, sumptuous grids. God is in the Details is a picture that evokes a stained glass window. Its vertical design is a quilt of quiet bars of earth tones punctuated by areas of dense, saturated red and one area where a thin veil of blue reveals the wood grain beneath. Human vulnerability (bruising, blood) plays off against the flow of nature and some aspect of the divine in this work of spiritual questing.

Art is a lens that distills life’s bumpy ride into visual metaphors that reflect the times. Nobody organizes this-it just happens. For years now, art has been mirroring the jittery conditions of a world fueled by too much caffeine and information whose balance is shifting and whose disharmony is a daily front-page occurrence. Art now is increasingly consumed by ideas of aggregation, accretion and the grotesque. And while it’s not a soothsayer or doctor, art can speak to people about their times. An exhibit like Order(ed) is a great opportunity. It brings together artists whose work communicates ideas about order and beauty, and it provides a platform from which to discuss the art-and to discuss the world from which it springs.

ROBERTA FALLON
February 2006

*Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
**”What you see is what you see.” -Frank Stella

Julie Karabenick’s is a careful, unsentimental mind in the midst of self-clarification. In each set of her explorations, one finds emotional depth, unity, and a complex internal conversation between subtly-wrought colors and shapes. The artist has developed a long process by which a work of hers takes hold over several months, from pencil sketches, through long trial-and-error revision on the computer (which, it should be said, does not make the work easier but rather acts as an aid to the unconscious), then a careful mixing of paint for color value then, quixotically, a return to the canvas to apply and actualize the design. If Karabenick’s best early work was piercing and cerebral, concerned with geometry and visual perception, it may be that only with the completion and dissemination of her current “Compositions” series – forty paintings and counting so far – that she will really arrive as a significant artist with a remarkably distinctive, if currently unfashionable, voice.

“Compositions” begins with an attempt at a Mondrianic perfect balance in the early paintings of the series such as Composition 1, but moves very quickly to somewhat different terrain. At first, a distinction between very large and very small or narrow color-shapes emerges. If Karabenick herself does not compose with figure and ground separately in mind— one can see this by looking at pencil sketches for the paintings — the large areas still start by projecting what feels for the viewer like a background interrupted by conglomerations of lesser rectangles; sometimes these conglomerations proliferate around a cross that divides the canvas in four. Beyond the composition, a Karabenick work is an intimate dialogue between both contrasting and nearly identical colors; her palate is far more diverse than that of your average geometric minimalist, but the overall effect of her choices, contrasts and juxtapositions is somehow always restrained, never flashy.

The real heroes of the “Compositions” series, however, are the tiniest: the pesky pixel squares that seem to multiply like little cells in unpredictable ways across the surface of the canvas. A tremendous amount of precise intuition has been crammed into these little squares— they generate minute imbalances that set the painting into a sense of incremental, provisional motion, rather than have it project a prioriperfection. To speak of Mondrian could even be misleading here, because Karabenick slowly tries, over the course of the series, to push as far as she can toward delicate imperfection balanced out in equally delicate ways; and, as the works grow more risky, and teasing, gently inverting all thought of figure and ground, large or small, contrast and similitude, what emerges is not completion or apotheosis, but process: deliberate, increasingly playful, exhaustive. By Composition 40, Karabenick has come out of the tricky woods for a moment, and the painting offers breath, a redemptive lightness. Looking back through the earlier Compositions from this vantage, one is struck by how remarkably varied Karabenick’s investigations have been, given the discipline and formal restrictions she has taken on. It is a mark of her seriousness and legitimate ambition that she has stuck to her guns, and won.

Artist and curator Julie Karabenick has gathered together 12 artists who share her deep interest in painting, geometry and structure. Each of them, including Karabenick, is represented by one work in the exhibition, “Engaging the Structural.” Most of the works are easel-sized, that is, not too large nor too small, not dependent upon extreme scale to make a point. Five of the works are classic painting rectangles in size and proportions, and as such, neutral in shape. The other six are square, a shape that is also neutral, at equilibrium and stable. The two exceptions are an elongated horizontal rectangle —which is actually a double square —and a relief-like construction. The formats in these works, however, yield to the primacy of the painting; the subject of these works is not the frame, not the support, and the structure under discussion is the structure within the painting. Without exception, these are all retinal works. Geared to visuality, vested in formal concerns and perceptual strategies, their sources rooted in Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Minimalism, Pattern and Design and other modernist movements, these paintings are almost all non-objective works with no appropriative tropes, no irony and only a passing interest in merging geometric abstraction with representation or with narrative. Color, shape, line and what these formal elements can be made to do continue to obsess these hard-wired painters and geometricians. Still entrenched in their chosen terrain, still enthralled by its mysteries and possibilities, they are not about to decamp anytime soon.

There is a wonderfully wide range of style and sensibility in these paintings, from stripes to grids to variations and combinations of geometric figures that are straight and curved, hard-edged and soft, analytical and expressive, simple and complex. As a psychologist and artist, Karabenick is fascinated by the primal power that geometric figures continue to exert. For Karabenick, who is passionate about geometric form and pattern, one impulse in organizing “Engaging the Structural” was to show the diversity of contemporary geometric abstraction and to marvel at the continued vitality of this historic tradition. Artists, Karabenick proves, are still drawn to the richness of its syntax, a syntax that seems inexhaustible.

Two of the most reductive of the artists here are Timothy App and Tim McFarlane. App is a latter day minimalist with architectural inclinations. His “Lair,” a 44″ square of black, white, grey and tan colored forms, might be interpreted as an asymmetrically balanced pattern of regular and irregular shapes set against a warmed ground, or a series of regular shapes that overlap each other. It might also be seen as a schematized, modernist interior with a cool light that touches on the poetics of the void. Like all the abstractions here, “Lair” (or does App mean Liar, as all art is, in some ways) can be perceived in a number of ways.

Tim McFarlane’s “Here/There,” on the other hand, is an homage to–or deconstruction of–the stripe, another modernist standard. McFarlane’s three darkly striped, vertical blocks, each a different height and width, abut each other, like city buildings, shoulder to shoulder. The upper quadrant of the panel is left blank and it is alternatively a negative space or a positive shape. Its main function, however, is to focus attention on the striped planes, emphasizing the architectonic divisions within the square and those divisions shifting relationships, shifting alliances.

Vincent Romaniello’s top to bottom vertical stripes are of a different order, alternating between thick and thin, between a range of reds from deep to pale, intercut by Barnett Newman-like “zips” of light and dark. Layered with a gauzy wash of white here and there and splattered by dots and dashes of white, their placement dictated by chance and gravity, Romaniello combines the geometric with a looser, more fluid touch, setting his sequence of bands and stripes into a rhythmically arresting, visually syncopated movement that traverses the surface of his painting.

From stripes the exhibition moves to the grid, arguably the emblematic motif of modernism. Siri Berg’s version of it is executed in oil on linen, a vertical rectangle that reads like a color chart, only much more nuanced. Consisting of a dozen units divided into three rows of four rectangles, the top and bottom rows are graduated shades of luminous grey, warm and cool, that emit a shimmer of light where their edges meet. The center row is yellow, orange, red and a red purple, the hues suggesting a brilliant, rosy-fingered dawn by means of the purest non-objectivity.

“Roza,” Gail Gregg’s meticulously crafted, warm little 12″ grid, is an encaustic painting on panel. Partitioned by vertical bands of salmon pink crossed by thin horizontal lines, the resulting squares are each partitioned again by a lengthwise stripe, then each section is stroked with fine, repeating vertical lines to create an intricately textured ground that flickers in response to light. The surface configuration suggests a textile pattern, a gameboard, an aerial view, things cultivated, crafted by the human hand, created by the human will and imagination. More to the point, “Roza,” like all of the works here, demonstrates a utopian belief in the sense of order, art’s antidote to the chaos and terror of life, a chaos that has reasserted itself time and again, as it does now, in daily catastrophic events.

“Uttar 250,” part of a continuing series by Joanne Mattera, is the most luxuriant painting here, inspired by the colors of India, by traditional Indian miniature painting with its saffrons, roses, vermilions, indigos, emeralds, cinnabars. Also encaustic, its version of the grid consists of three stacks of more or less even strokes of colors which in turn drip paint, like syrup. This is a voluptuous painting, its grid about to melt down, it seems, into pure, irresistible paint.

Julie Karabenick, on the other hand, takes the constructivist grid and explodes it. Using a lexicon of only squares and rectangles, beginning with a square module within a square field, Karabenick varies the dimensions of these basic shapes, her practice intent on proving the infinite diversity of purposeful limitation. The colors are flat, restrained but when juxtaposed, create their own scintillation. Through a system of carefully calculated color interactions, a kind of optical chain reaction, Karabenick’s pixellated pointillism gives a new spin to dynamic equilibrium.

Both Christine Vaillancourt’s “Matter Data III” and W.C. Richardson’s “Cold Reasons” are strikingly patterned. Vaillancourt delimits the frontal plane of her painting with four cleanly contoured rectangles of white or black that obscure what is behind them. They are painted over a crowd of smaller black, white and colored circles, ovals and squares that surround them, floating in an indeterminate spatial field. Layered and overlapped to create an illusion of space, Vaillancourt’s geometries have drift and buoyancy.

Richardson’s alkyd painting, on the other hand, is a tightly ordered square, its outermost plane fixed by four vertical rows of opaque white dots. Behind them appears a crackled, porous, red-brown drawing that resembles a cross section of a plant, say. Then there are an interlocked series of angled, double-lobed shapes placed like stylized leaves on a stem, one in black, the other white, reversing between image and ground, positive and negative, surface and depth; they could also read as a flat, biomorphic design in the same plane. However they are decoded, Richardson’s dialectically constructed painting elegantly presents a number of perceptual conundrums.

The last four painters are more difficult to group. Howard R. Barnhart’s work is a relief, the shapes cut-out and layered. However, it is the chromatic contrast and interaction that interests him most, the weight and measure of one color against the other that determines the shapes and structural integrity of the construction. Barnhart’s “Composition” a joyously colored, interlocked puzzle of pastels, recalls a sculpture as much as a painting, and as such, more literally realizes the structural engagement that is the theme of this exhibition.

Marjorie L. Mikasen’s painting, “Rasa 3″ ( rasa is Hindu for “the essence of”), is what the artist calls a ”stereopair,” defined as a ”side-by-side image that is meant to be viewed using free vision or cross-eyed vision.” Part of an ongoing series, “Rasa 3,” evenly divided into two sections, gives us a pair of images to focus on and merge, their translucent architectonic structures based on a profusion of rectangles and triangles. Rising against a field that is partially patterned with curvilinear forms, “Rasa” suggests a schematic plan for a futuristic complex and demonstrates Mikasen’s deep involvement with the physiological and psychological processes of perception.

Cecily Kahn’s lilting painting, “Bind,”differs from most of the other works in this show in its softness and tempered geometry. Less hard-edged and analytical, its composition is more intuitively arrived at, spontaneous, looser in assembly. It has a beguiling insouciance, as well as the look of collage and montage, its shapes irregular with a mix of textures, patterns, marks and strokes. Kahn says she likes to combine the geometric with poured images and more organic, naturalistic forms which, for her, reflect the dichotomies of urban life.

Laurie Fendrich’s tautly conceived oil painting, “Jeanie,” with its distinctive palette of artificial colors and faultless surface, is based on a vocabulary of geometric forms with numerous art historical inferences, if not quite references. In this particular painting, a rakish, double oval–a kind of barbell on its side–suggests a female silhouette balanced by a rather bulbous shape that might read as a vessel or a mirror, an escaped “genie” or a nod to Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror.” Beneath are a scattering of rectangles broken down into bands of different colors, designs that look like a color key to the painting, emphasizing, as this show does throughout, that painting–whatever else it is–is still formal, an invention, a specific arrangement of color, line, shape, light, movement and space that is, for those who love it, irreplaceable.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes for several publications in the United States and abroad. A frequent contributor to Art in America, she is also a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.

Julie Karabenick’s “Recent Paintings” at the Washington Street Gallery
features this local artist’s colorful computerized geometry reconstructed on acrylic canvases.

As Karabenick says of her art, “Works in geometric abstraction are
sometimes considered intellectual or remote. However, such
judgments diverge markedly from both the working attitude and intent
of my work. I would like my paintings to delight the senses and
engender an aesthetically pleasing experience.”

Karabenick further adds that she uses technology to develop her
compositions by transferring pencil sketches with color experiments
“often over a period of months” in her computer. The result of her effort
are paintings that are in her words, “unified, delicately balanced, yet
dynamic wholes,” where each design is transferred to the canvas with
areas of color being “carefully masked off, its edges sealed, and
multiple thin layers of flat acrylic paint applied.”

Karabenick’s strategy is a melding of mid-20th century Dutch master
Piet Mondrian’s stricktly rectilinear geometric abstraction to the use of
computer graphics.

This fusion of intense theorization with relatively uncomplicated
palettes and patterns has yielded some astonishingly sophisticated
art that’s both pristine and passionate.

Karabenick’s paintings—each is given the title of “Composition” and
assigned by number—floats effortlessly on its working surface in a
carefully measured harmony. The precise geometry branches off in
serial precision while sharp-edged acrylic pigments produce a
delightfully vibrant chromatic symmetry.

In crafting these deceptively complicated artworks through a stylish
aesthetic that demands exactness and heart, Karabenick’s work
gives us color and form shorn of superfluous adornment. Such a
refinement is as rare as it is accomplished.

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Key to Philadelphia

Volume 1, Issue #1, May 1-14, 2006

by Krystyna Warchol

Gallery Siano opens a group exhibition titled Order(ed), guest curated by Julie Karabenick. Karabenick is an accomplished abstract artist whose work explores the communicative power of basic geometric forms. For the show at Gallery Siano, she has gathered seventeen artists from the US and Canada (inluding five from Philadelphia) who share her interest in and commitment to the modernist tradition of geometric abstraction. This elegant and focused survey gives the viewer an opportunity to appreciate the richness and diversity of geometric abstraction today.

The curator herself is an admirer of De Stijl and Constructivism, and clearly so are some artists in the show. It’s not surprising to see the influences of the Cubism, Minimalism, and Pattern and Design movements as well. The show points to the vitality of geometric abstraction by demonstrating how artists working within the non-objective mode have transformed it to suit their own wide range of individual artistic goals and concerns. The elements these artists use-stripes and grids, straight edges and curves, the whole range of geometric figures-are familiar; yet the final results are fresh and visually satisfying.

Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia art critic and blogger, writes in the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition: “While the stream of geometric abstraction runs deep in 20th century art … Today’s geometric abstract art comes out of the caudlron of the times and merges our need for personal expression with our need for a system, a way out of the clutter, chaos and overload that are part of our world.”
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